


AUception, free for all

by notavodkashot



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Gen, I Don't Even Know, please check warnings and tags in individual chapters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-16
Updated: 2019-01-31
Packaged: 2019-05-24 07:31:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 2,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14950308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notavodkashot/pseuds/notavodkashot
Summary: This is basically a place to throw in all those ficlet prompts that are based on any of my main AUs, but are also AUs of those AUs.Thus, AUception.





	1. SiO!AU, Aulea lives

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is an AU for [_words are futile devices_](https://archiveofourown.org/series/852660), mostly known as the sun is out verse, for the first main story.
> 
> The main premise is that Aulea survives long enough to meet Cor when he returns with Nyx and Prompto, at the beginning of the story, rather than die while he's away.

“Shut up,” Cor hissed, and it was cute, really, the way his face heated up.

Aulea smiled. It was one of her nicest smiles, the kind that was sharp and vicious and would invariably end with someone finding themselves gutted in it.

“I haven’t said anything,” she said, leaning forward, elbow resting on one knee, legs folded one over the other, and chin resting on her hand. 

“I can hear you thinking it,” Cor hissed, clearly put out.

The smile widened. 

“Oh, able to hear my thoughts now, are you?” Aulea teased. “What am I thinking, then?”

Cor sighed, but slowly, in stages, like a slow motion sigh, because a regular one wouldn’t do the knot of awkward in his throat justice.

“That I’m an idiot.”

Aulea snorted unkindly.

“And the sky is blue, usually, yes,” she said, and then leaned in further, to hook a hand on his belt and tug him down to sit next to her, on her bed. “Why don’t you tell me the whole sordid story and then I’ll actually tell you what I think about it.”

Cor considered, and then sighed again. He wasn’t entirely sure when he ended up with his face buried into one thigh, trying to escape the fingers twisting his hair in amusement. It almost didn’t hurt.

It almost didn’t hurt.

That was the thing that hurt the most.

“Maybe your son could meet my son,” Aulea whispered, when he was done, and the edge had dulled, and he hated it, because it was soft and he didn’t know how to handle her, when she was soft. “And maybe they can be friends, and not gut each other with knives, like you and me.”

“He’s not my son,” Cor muttered sullenly.

“And you’re not my brother,” Aulea retorted dryly, nails digging into his scalp for a moment, before fingertips soothed the imprints, almost in apology. “But that doesn’t make it any less true.”

Cor hated the fact she had a point. As usual.


	2. puppyverse!AU young!Cor rescued by older!Nyx in Galahd

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is an AU for [_all of me and all of you sit down quietly in the dark_](https://archiveofourown.org/series/908247), colloquially (and tongue-in-cheek) known as the puppyverse.
> 
> The premise is Cor being significantly younger than Nyx, and rather than reuniting with the rest of the roadtrip gang, washing up in Galahd.

The boy has a hollow leg, Nyx likes to gripe, more to tease him than anything else. It’s not like they don’t have enough to feed an extra mouth - even one that turns out to be connected to an entirely hollow leg - what with Selena’s new role in the island and Nyx’s own, orbiting around her. The offerings come freely, copiously. The real problem is figuring out the best way to share them with those who need them.

The boy needs them, the offerings and the help, and Nyx and Selena, smiling wryly at the weirdly pale skin and the icy blue eyes. He’s a quiet, bitter little thing, when he’s human and when he’s not. It’s that, really, what he needs Nyx and Selena the most for. Because Selena vouched for him, and so no one will harm him, in all Galahd, no one would dare. And because Nyx takes to walking down worn paths with him, out of the noise of the city and the cacophony of people being people, and into fields and the forests, in the rain and in that murky sunlight that’s almost always twilight. Sometimes, the boy agrees to walk on his own two feet, and Nyx pretends not to notice the way he struggles to match his stride, to figure out how to walk without heartbreak forcing his back to bow. Most of the time he treks after Nyx on four sturdy paws, limbs long and strong, each day larger than the day before.

“You’ve never asked for my name,” the boy tells him, one day, a week to the first anniversary since Nyx found him, half drowned, on the shore fleeing something he wouldn’t name.

“It’s your name,” Nyx points out, eyebrows arched. “You’ll give it when you feel like it. Or not at all.”

“You may offer, but never ask,” the boy recites the well worn wisdom with a wry smile.

“Just like that,” Nyx replies, laughing.

“Cor,” he says, three months later, trailing after Nyx into a canyon to gather materials for the Rite. “My name’s Cor.”


	3. rescue!puppy AU: Ardyn finds Cor first.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is an AU for [_all of me and all of you sit down quietly in the dark_](https://archiveofourown.org/series/908247), collectively called the rescue!puppy AU.
> 
> The premise is rather than Cor finding his way back to Regis and the others, after the curse, he runs into Ardyn who is... dealing with the aftermath of the destruction of the crystal and what it means to be... purified. So to speak.

Ardyn, after the Crystal shattered... well, he's not really Ardyn anymore.

Not entirely.

Not quite.

Because he’s not the locus of the scourge. The scourge is  _gone_. He’s not the Accursed. Well, not the way once was. He’s certainly not thirty million daemons in a trenchcoat anymore.

He’s… something else. And he’d meant to go and see Gil, again, now that the scourge is purged and the world… well, not safe but different, and perhaps it will meet damnation but it won’t be at his hands. And he’s very tired and very worn and when he gets there he finds…

Well.

Cor.

Furry, awkward, broken up Cor. And he knows, of course he knows that’s not a wolf. Not just by the size alone. Not just by the way it looks at him. It hums with the magic of the Craig.

“You’ve met with a terrible fate, haven’t you,” he tells the boy inside the pup, and he gathers him up in his arms and decides not to walk down the Crag again.

It’s not a small thing, Cor. Not even then. But neither is Ardyn. And Ardyn is still drunk on two thousand years worth of memories and it takes Cor a while but he  _remembers_.

Ardyn was there, when Mors broke the crystal.

Ardyn is… shattered, not unlike the crystal: he’s not the healer he was, when he took in the core of the scourge, and he’s not the monster he became afterwards. They’re both foreign to him, weird and shapeless and  _wrong_.

And yet, he’s not… not them.

He’s still the man who became them.

He plops Cor on the bed of the small cabin he’s using, at Wiz’s expense. He’s working with birds because he still remembers being fond of them, and it’s easy work and it pays well and he needs something to do while the fog in his head settles down. Animals like him. They have no reason not to, now that he’s not oozing taint and blight out every pore. All he has to do is keep track of the ones at the rental spot. It’s a boring job but it’s close to the Craig and it gives Ardyn time to make up his mind to go down and see what’s become of the one person he once thought he loved.

But now, Cor.

Gangly, monstrous puppy, Cor, sitting on his bed and whimpering every time he runs a hand on his head.

“I could… tear it off you, I guess,” Ardyn says, fingers running through thick, short fur, “the curse I mean. I could tear it off, but it’s wound right down to your bones. I think you’ll lose more of yourself to it, than you will be left with.”

…so obviously, they’ll have to think of something else.


	4. rescue!puppy AU: Ardyn tries to feed them. Keyword, tries.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is an AU for [_all of me and all of you sit down quietly in the dark_](https://archiveofourown.org/series/908247), collectively called the rescue!puppy AU.
> 
> The premise is rather than Cor finding his way back to Regis and the others, after the curse, he runs into Ardyn who is... dealing with the aftermath of the destruction of the crystal and what it means to be... purified. So to speak.

“Oh, stop that,” Ardyn said, rolling his eyes, “I happen to know what I’m doing.”

“Uh huh,” Cor hummed, and crouched further behind the safety of a boulder.

Before Ardyn, three not particularly appetizing fish sat not very encouragingly. Well, it shouldn’t be too hard, anyway. If you had raw food you added fire and it was edible.

Easy!

“Little bit, little bit,” Ardyn said, more to himself than anything else, feeling his blood boil in his veins, magic bubbling over immediately as soon as he thought about it. “Just a tad…”

He flicked his fingers forward, aiming for a tiny wisp of fire.

What actually came out was a fireball the size of a full grown garulessa that left a fucking three feet deep crater and a trail of nearly fifty feet of scorched forest before him.

Cor snorted.

“Oh shut up,” Ardyn snarled over his shoulder, and made a rude gesture as he cast a flicker of blizzard to keep the fire from spreading out and destroying the entire region. Magic fire, it turned out, didn’t fucking went off sometimes. Just because. “I don’t see you offering any brilliant ideas.”

“Don’t see me setting the entire fucking forest on fire, either,” Cor snapped back and then puffed into fur and took off running the moment Ardyn snarled at him.

Brat.


	5. crunch!rescue AU: Aftermath of Regicide

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So this is an AU of an AU of an AU - and the title of this collection suddenly makes sense - to wit: An AU of the rescue!puppy AU - itself an AU for the puppy AU - with elements of the crunch AU - which is also an AU of the Puppy AU.
> 
> The premise is Ardyn finding Cor after the curse, and eventually following him back to Insomnia where it becomes apparent that Mors doing terrible things to this poor kid, so Ardyn feels inclined to put an end to that. Via murder. Because Ardyn. (To be fair, Mors had it coming.)
> 
> **No explicit or implied mentions of CSA in this particular piece, but it is a thing in the context of this AU.**

“…what are you doing?” Cor asked, quiet, sullen, staring as Ardyn twitched his fingers and waited until the chick puffed up - it was gangly and growing, it doubled in size nearly every week - wings half spread and shaking tauntingly, before he threw a kernel of popcorn at it.

“What does it look like?” Ardyn asked right back, because he was exactly the kind of asshole who answered every question with a question and Cor would be a lot more annoyed about that if he could muster any emotion strong enough to perforate through the fog of numb disbelief then wrapped cozily around his head. And then, because this was Ardyn, he said to the bird, “sit,” and offered it another kernel when it plopped down the ground so abruptly it raised a small cloud of sand.

Cor stared and stared, and then he asked, because he couldn’t not ask, and it was the most inoffensive thing he could say anyway:

“ _Why_ are you teaching tricks to the bird?”

And Ardyn stared right back and grinned.

"Well, I can’t exactly teach them to you, now, can I?”

Cor let himself sat bonelessly on the bench, next to him, and didn’t exactly bristle when Ardyn offered him the bag of popcorn with that insufferably smug grin of his.


	6. puppyverse!AU Cor somehow manages to get himself captured, the Galahdians disapprove

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is an AU for [_all of me and all of you sit down quietly in the dark_](https://archiveofourown.org/series/908247), colloquially (and tongue-in-cheek) known as the puppyverse.
> 
> The premise is Cor somehow managing to get captured and the Galahdians coming to the rescue.

They’ve been holding and holding and holding, for weeks now. Walking on two legs rather than four, chasing a trail, hunting down leads. It’s search and rescue, what they’re doing, and they’re not built for it, the coeurls - search and destroy - and so they have to be human for this, swallowing back and holding. Holding.

They find him in the bottom of a mineshaft, the only safe place they could find to keep him, apparently, and he’s broken in places and bleeding in others, half curled on his side and not waking up.

“Now?” Axis asks, quiet, soft.

Holding.

Holding.

“Now,” Nyx agrees, approaching the figure and ignoring the static choking the air.

 _Loose_.

The entire mine burns, inside out, but it’s fine because they don’t care. They don’t care. Nyx sits with his back against the rockwall, Cor sprawled boneless in his lap, and very carefully pulls out every hook and needle off his skin, watching sinew fold over and heal.

They couldn’t kill him, despite it all. But that only means they ran of out ideas to  _try_.

“It’s okay,” Nyx whispers, letting Cor lean in, blindly reaching for his throat, burying his face there and  _inhaling_. “It’s okay.”

It really isn’t. But there’s fur and sparks, as the others come back, curling close, piling up in choking heat and fur and.

“Sorry,” Cor whispers, boneless, tired, “for the inconvenience.”

Nyx doesn’t scream. He’s rather proud of himself for it.


	7. Nyx The Witch AU

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The request was a Ten Years of Darkness AU where Nyx somehow survived. Well, he did. He just wishes he hadn't, in this one.

“You should come to Lestallum with me,” Cor tells him, deadpan and mechanical, because he always says the same thing, every time he comes to him.

“That wouldn’t be wise,” Nyx replies, sitting on the threshold of the witches’ hut, which he’s been threatened will soon be his, legs folded up as he curls into a ball of spite and broken vows.

Cor remembers him, before he became what he is, branded by the Lucii, body broken and sore and perpetually stuck in that instant before death. Magic overflows out of his pores, at least this way he can still be useful.

Because that’s all he is now, isn’t it? That’s all he’s got left. To be of use, in life and in death and this weird non-state inbetween.

“Fuck being wise,” Cor says, and goes sit with him, carefully not touching until Nyx gives in and leans against him, because he looks like he feels most of the time, and Cor is so keenly afraid the wrong touch will make him crumble into dust. “You don’t deserve this.”

Nyx sighs a laugh and doesn’t say anything more, because no one deserves this, and he’s so far past being able to give a shit about what’s fair and just, it’s better if he just… stops. Stays.

Remains.


	8. rescue!puppy AU: Ardyn does not care about Cor, personally. Of course not.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is an AU for [_all of me and all of you sit down quietly in the dark_](https://archiveofourown.org/series/908247), collectively called the rescue!puppy AU.
> 
> The premise is rather than Cor finding his way back to Regis and the others, after the curse, he runs into Ardyn who is... dealing with the aftermath of the destruction of the crystal and what it means to be... purified. So to speak.

He’s pretty bad at this whole magic thing.

Ardyn already knew that, of course, but he’d known it in a shapeless, wordless way, the same one knows a coeurl is dangerous before actually seeing it do anything. Instinctual, that. He’d known the boy was bad at magic – he’d been drowning in his own power, metabolizing emotions into spells without even thinking about it, when he’d found him, of course he was bad at it, he knew no better – but he’d expected him to at least have the self-preservation to pull through.

Ardyn does not think about how that feels, overwhelming power without an outlet that makes death seem like a pleasant option to take. Ardyn does not think about why he knows that feeling so intimately well.

Above all, Ardyn tells himself, he’s not feeling sympathetic.

The boy’s a pet, often more literally than figuratively. One does not have sympathy for pets, it turns them into spoiled little monsters.

And still, there he is, breathing rasping in his throat, magic tied up into knots, slowly but surely wasting away to nothing. If this is meant to be the end of him, Ardyn knows he shouldn’t interfere. He told himself, after all, in the beginning, this was meant to be a curiosity after all. Just another slight detour before he gave into masochism and crawled down into the Crag, to see what’s become of Gil. Gilgamesh. Yes.

If it’s meant to be a disappointingly short detour, well. That is fine. This is fine, really. He’s glad it’s ending before he gets a chance to get bored. It’d be worse to heal the boy, and then have him stick around forever, like a wart.

Of course.

_Of course._

“You are hopeless,” Ardyn says, tugging the boy – he spills boneless, shapeless liquid of misery and resignation – into his arms. “It’s a bother.”

He still sits there, under the shadow of ancient trees, and guides the boy’s own magic to heal rather than consume.

Procrastination, Ardyn tells himself, is in his nature.

Nothing more.


	9. crunch!rescue AU: Ardyn and Titus, on Cor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So this is an AU of an AU of an AU - and the title of this collection suddenly makes sense - to wit: An AU of the rescue!puppy AU - itself an AU for the puppy AU - with elements of the crunch AU - which is also an AU of the Puppy AU.
> 
> The premise is Ardyn finding Cor after the curse, and eventually following him back to Insomnia where it becomes apparent that Mors doing terrible things to this poor kid, so Ardyn feels inclined to put an end to that. Via murder. Because Ardyn. (To be fair, Mors had it coming.)

It’s going to be a disaster, of course.

Ardyn can smell the pain and the misery from a mile away, and he should, in good conscience, stop it. He should. But he’s never been particularly good at doing what he should – saving the world, loving his brother, rescuing Gil, ending the scourge, not being himself – so he reckons at least there’s precedent justifying the fact he sits back, instead, to watch.

Titus Drautos is a man very ill suited, in his opinion, to serve the King of Lucis, though that might just be Ardyn being bitter and snide and inwardly choosing to selectively hate pieces of the King, given his usual approach to hate him wholesale would invariably end with a fight with Cor.

It’s not that Ardyn cares if he upsets Cor – he does, in fact, make a daily amusement of it, after all – but if Cor were to fight him, truly fight him, with that reckless, soulless abandon of his, regardless of his own well-being, Ardyn could stand a distressingly good chance of not surviving intact.

And that’d be just a mess, really.

Titus Drautos trailing after Cor with that particularly confused, heartbroken look on his face, well that’s a mess, too. Just. A smaller one. Better.

“If you’d touched him, I-“

Ardyn smiles the vacant, empty smile of pointless satisfaction. He had not envisioned the boy to be a tool quite this way, to be used in bringing shame and infamy onto his bloodline the way Ardyn never could before – to show them, what they were like, all of them, the Kings of the Stone, servants of Gods and destroyers of Men – but that’s just how it goes. It’s how it goes.

“If, if, if… it’s _when_ you should ask,” Ardyn says, eyes narrowed at Titus, strangely comforted by the sight of his fury, “and you should ask _him_. What is this nonsense of yours, of asking the suspects, but not the victims? You’ll get nowhere, if you won’t take him at his word.”

**Author's Note:**

> Come hang out on [DW](https://notavodkashot.dreamwidth.org/) or [Twitter](https://twitter.com/notavodkashot), if you'd like.


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